It's a thermal event with a Lithium Ion battery. Nothing new at all. Hell, even Hybrid cars are susceptible to a battery fire if the accident they're in is significant enough to cause internal damage.

Also of note is if you take your iPhone/Droid/iPad/Samsung Galaxy to Achmed' & Nguyen's cell phone repair, or you buy no-name batteries off eBay or Amazon, you can expect that you're putting yourself at the same risk since training on how to handle and rebuild these unit's isn't a top priority for them.

After all, why spend money on safety items when they can just pass the savings on to you!

Never had an exploding battery issue, but my old Acer laptop would get extremely hot on the bottom side...not scalding hot mind you, but hot enough that it was uncomfortable on the legs if I were sitting with it on my lap...even through jeans. Happened pretty much from the time it was new.

/eventually got a bigger, badder Dell which doesn't roast the twig and berries at all..

Just wanted to let you know that batteries in laptops are still exploding.This time, it was the battery cell in my Acer 8951G laptop's wireless trackpad that blew up and bulged out.

One of these things is not like the other (and the "blew up" part is 100% poetic license).

Here is the story from another user with the exact same problem who Acer actually did help at no charge.

Wrong again. It's not a "story" someone submitted regarding Acer's handling of their out-of-warranty device. It's a link to some random forum where someone mentioned that Acer replaced their trackpad as a... wait for it... WARRANTY REPLACEMENT.

All I can say is my Acer Aspire One with the 10.5 screen and the big 7 hr battery is doing just fine. It was a demo that my employer wanted to get along with their smaller unit with an 8 inch screen to see if they could do the job we needed. We got them in 2009. By 2010, the boss went with a standard 15 inch Lenovo for everyone. Bought 40 of them. As of this past month, we have five that still work, and all of them look like they were dragged behind a truck. We never take them home and we never did much that required us to even move them. They just sucked big ole donkey nuggets. Both Acers are still working fine and mine looks practically new, even after three airplane trips and four car trips of more than 500 miles.

The whole premise of a battery is to take energy and concentrate it into a small space, in a form that makes it easy to release later

This is also very near the definition of a bomb. The main difference is that in a battery the release is supposed to be slow and controlled, instead of fast and uncontrolled.

Batteries are just slow, controllable bombs, except when control is lost. Then they are just bombs.

Body fat is another strategy to take energy and concentrate it into a small space, in a form that makes it (ostensibly) easy to release later. When that control is lost, musicians (especially drummers) can likewise spontaneously combust.

Acer did OK by me during the great battery recall of '07. By then mine was almost two years old and not good at holding a charge, and they replaced it out of warranty (along with everyone else who had Sony batteries). Battery still lasts a solid 45 minutes in use. I finally retired that thing last month, was holding up pretty well but the CPU and GPU were just so behind the times. (Even if it was upgraded with an engineering sample Core2Duo back when you had to get them shipped from a guy who knows a guy in China.)

I've never even heard of this detachable trackpad BS, though. Is that anything like a miniaturized drawing tablet?

Claude Ballse:It's a thermal event with a Lithium Ion battery. Nothing new at all. Hell, even Hybrid cars are susceptible to a battery fire if the accident they're in is significant enough to cause internal damage.

Also of note is if you take your iPhone/Droid/iPad/Samsung Galaxy to Achmed' & Nguyen's cell phone repair, or you buy no-name batteries off eBay or Amazon, you can expect that you're putting yourself at the same risk since training on how to handle and rebuild these unit's isn't a top priority for them.

After all, why spend money on safety items when they can just pass the savings on to you!

This. I used to be in battery sales and there are reasons why an OEM is $xx dollars and Super Charge Awesome Life Star 7 is $ 0.XX on ebay or amazon.

I won't get into a long discussion on this but when you dissect something like a laptop battery, you'll see the quality differences. So many times I'd see off brand crap claiming 4000mah 6 cell, only to find 4 cells and spacers inside and a spec on the cell different than the casing label.

But electronic OEM's are not manufacturing the batteries (with a few exceptions). And a lot of times they buy from whatever factory they want to (as it meets their specs). Just because you had your Brand X laptop for 10 years and only buy brand X laptop batteries, doesn't mean you're getting the brand X guts in that battery.

This guys problem could range from other factors as possibly the charging circuit involved. I don't really think this is a safety concern unless I saw pics. I can remember playing my Game Boy in the early 90's and while I was playing it the back got real hot and the 4 AA's in back were leaking and bubbling, burning my hand. I washed my hands and put in a new set for some more Tetris.